(This article is copyrighted (c) 2012 by Steve Becker, LCSW. The use of male gender pronouns is strictly for convenience's sake and not to suggest that females aren't capable of the behaviors and attitudes discussed.) “Loyalty” and “the sociopath” are incompatible terms. We've discussed many traits of the exploitive personality, but let's not minimize a very vital one: deficient loyalty. Clearly, deficient loyalty is a sociopathic characteristic. A deficiency of loyalty can be disguised very well by clever, self-serving rationalizations. But you will not find the case of a true sociopath about whom you will ever be able to say: he (or she) was really, through and through, truly loyal. L …
Just a dream: the subconscious doesn’t forget
One night last week, I awoke from a very real dream. It was not horrible or frightening. In fact, it was quite ordinary. It was a very accurate depiction of the everyday exchanges that commonly occurred in what was once my life. As dreams go, things were slightly out of place and somewhat strange, but I understood. In the dream, it was a crisp October evening. I was dressed in jeans and a sweater. He was dressed in navy blue dress pants and a white shirt. The accoutrements were missing from the shirt, as they often were in reality. Why we were together, as he came from work, I have no idea. I was younger in the dream, the age I was the day we met, but he was his current age. We …